New tab management feature going to Chrome. You need Chrome Canary to try out this new “tab scrolling” feature, but it’s worth a separate installation.
When enabled, the strip of open tabs at the top of Chrome extends “beyond” the window border. As you add more, instead of making each tab smaller and making them a bigger mess, new tabs will appear below the scrollable strip.
You can navigate the scrollable strip by clicking on the small three-dot icons that appear next to the tab strip. This approach is more advanced than Chrome traditionally displays open tabs, but it is still in beta, so changes are likely to occur before it is brought to the default version of Chrome.
As for Chrome Canary, this is a special edition of the browser that serves as Google’s testing center for all kinds of experimental and incomplete Chrome features. Some of these tests will never be moved to the public version of Chrome, but since tab scrolling is a common feature in Chrome’s rivals Firefox, it is a safe bet that it will be part of the Chrome update in the near future.
Until then, here’s how to enable the experimental tab scrolling feature in Chrome Canary:
- Download and install Chrome Canary.
- Open Chrome Canary and go to chrome: // flags /
- # Search for the Scrollable-tabstrip.
- Enable the scrollable tabstrip using the drop-down menu.
- Apply a change of settings by clicking “Restart art” to restart Chrome Canary.
Bottom Line: We tested this on two different Windows 10 PCs in different sizes. Enabling Chrome Canary’s tab scrolling works well on one, but often crashes the browser into another. Inconsistencies and bugs are common when using beta software, but they are still annoying. If this happens to you, disable the #scrollable-tabs strip or go back to using the old Chrome, which has recently added many new features.
